OK... Now it looks like we are getting to a potential problem that appears to be replicated.

Reminder: My S4000-E has 4 2TB drives installed in a RAID 5 config, resulting in 5.5 TB (5587 GB) available space. This requires the creation of three partitions: public (created by default and my choice to size to 2048 GB) , public-2 (created by choice at 2048 GB), and public-3 (created by choice with the remaining space)

So far, NAS-1/public has restored well.

I paused restoring NAS-1/public-2 and decided to let NAS-1/public-3 restore for a while.

That is when the problem became evident.

When I began to restore NAS-1/public-3, I saw that the speed of transfer was extremely slow.

Here is what that looked like:

The picture ablove shows a very slow transfer, when compare that with a screenshot of NAS-1/public-2 showing the expected transfer speed below...

Also disturbing was finding that the system log no longer had a complete record, but appeared to start over:

Knowing that the running restore of NAS-1/public-3 may take weeks at the speed displayed, I attempted to abort the restore, finally pulling the ethernet cable out to cause a loss of network resource.

Having stopped the restore, I reconnected the ethernet cable to the NAS. All partitions were still there, as well as all physical drives still indicating YELLOW in the RAID configuration.

On reboot of the drive, The home screen showed a screen that we have seen before:

A partition that thinks that it is shared, a partition that thinks that it is a backup, and a partition that is GONE.

(... and, yes, "public-3" again was at 0 bytes.)

In this case, I was able to again delete NAS-1/public-3, and then public and public-2 "came back" and the system again was ready.

The good news is that the physical drives remain in teh raid, and teh raid remain valid.

Again, I continued with the previously interrupted restore of NAS-1/public-2, with apparently no problem.

Here is the "new" home window, showing the space occupied by public and public-2:

SO.... HERE IS MY QUESTION(S) TO THE INTEL SUPPORT TEAM:

Why do I appear to have such a problem with the creation of "public-3", the partition that contains the remainder of the available drive space (approx. 1.5TB) ?

What affects that partition so that write speeds are so low?

Are there any suggestions of the partition size for that third partition? Does that even matter?

Are there any limitations on the S4000-E firmware that affects the creation of that partition? Is there a problem in exceeding 4096 (2048x2) total partitiond space?

While I did not initiate any change, here is the Disk Change Notification:

After removing the drive and reinserting, I received a rebuilding update:

If the time message is correct, then rebuld process of that drive will take over 4 days.

However, the rebuild process may not be of much value... as after reinserting the drive there is still no access to NAS-1/public:

("admin" and "public-2" can be accessed.)

After reinserting the drive, selecting [ Continue ] on the Disk Change Notification screen would NOT allow me to proceed to the Home screen, so I could not tell if the "public" partition was still there.

While unfamiliar with all the info that could be reviewed in this data, checking the MESSAGES file, I found the record of the disk being shut down by the S4000-E. This looks like the system failing and the system choosing to shut down the drive, rather than a physical drive failure:

I appreciate your detail for investigating this. However, we know that the 1.4 firmware for the SS4000 was created to allow for support for drives greater than 500 GB. The SS4000 was officially discontinued July 1, 2008. The last Tested hardware and operating system list was published February 2008 and contained one "officially" tested 1TB HDD. We don't know from a validation standpoint how drives that are not tested will function. If a customer chooses to use non-validated components, the operational testing becomes their responsibility. It looks like you've performed more than enough testing to determine that the 2TB HDDs you're using may not be reliable enough.

Again, thanks for your effort and I wish the results would have been more favorable.